Vera or the Nihilists

GENERAL: Why, five years ago, when I was a plain Colonel, I remember her, your Highness, a common waiting-girl in an inn. If I had known then what she was going to turn out, I would have flogged her to death on the roadside. She is not a woman at all, she is a sort of devil! For the last eighteen months I have been hunting her, and caught sight of her once last September outside Odessa.